Even the smallest meanest work became
A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament.

Pages

May 31, 2017

Sri Aurobindo might be closer to the universal machine than Plotinus

Dear Tusar,

"On 30 May 2017, at 11:18, Tusar Nath Mohapatra wrote:

I'm not competent to comment on all that you say here, but can understand to some extent the weight of your problems and, may be, their possible dystopian repercussions."

Yet, you just cited, and provided some interesting links on Sri Aurobindo, which propositions are very close to the one by the Universal Machine, notably on matter, in his "Matter" text. Quite interesting. http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/matter

Then what I say is that arithmetically ideally correct machine have a very similar discourse.

I appreciate Sri Aurobindo since a long time, but it is only by reading more recently his book on Heraclitus that I begin to think he might be even closer to the universal machine than Plotinus, and this says something!

Giordano Bruno seems more serious than Bruno Latour, but then I read only part of Latour's literature. He seems not aware of the mind-body problem, and he takes the physical world for granted, without making clear that it is an assumption. Whitehead seems more honest/correct on this, despite him too is unclear of what he assumes, and what he does not assume. I avoid that kind of literature, because there are too much ambiguities making too much large the class of possible interpretations.

Extracts:

1. "In short, for Śāntideva, the world actually is incomplete and lacking, and we misunderstand it if we don’t see this lack – a lack at least partially expressed in the notion of non-self. For ibn Sīnā it’s just that the world would be incomplete without God. But since he takes God to exist, for him the world is complete; it is as it should be. The similarity between the two is that we don’t adequately understand the world, it is incomplete in intelligibility, without the key idea of God or non-self."

This makes a lot of sense, and fits well the machine's classical philosophy.

2. "People of scientisic leanings are usually the first to notice that Husserl is playing this game. And since the game is directly at odds with their own program for bringing consciousness back into the natural world, they quickly become angry and dismissive toward Husserl. They see him as an idealist and as nothing more than an idealist... For Badiou really isn’t an innovator at all on this point, while Husserl is the biggest innovator of it in nearly 200 years, and arguably in the entire history of philosophy." comment on the Rorty quip from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman) "The unity of objects, for Husserl, is in those objects themselves, not in a human subject that bundles or counts them."

I guess the machine is closer to Husserl than to the people with scientific leaning, which are religious believer in Matter (the big "M" is for any notion of matter assumed as primary, or primitive).

3. "Joshua Ramey - The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual ... (2012) Description: Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition."

Deleuze has been useful for me, with his book "La logique du sens". But I am not so much a follower of hermetic thought, and already in Plotinus time, they add nonsense, it seems to me.

If you read Plotinus' ennead on Numbers, he is incredibly "modern", close to the problems seen by Cantor which led to Gödel. But Iamblichus "theology of Arithmetic" is pseudo-mystical numerology. I can appreciate it, because I do love the fist ten numbers on which the book is all about, but then, I take very seriously *all* the numbers, and Iamblichus seems to me committing a sort of special number idolatry (which was quite common at this time, and the pythagoreans have some responsibility).

4. "Following Bruno Latour, there have been articulations of the empirical as compositional, or, in Donna Haraway’s (2015, 161) terms, as the “compost” of emerging worlds. Matter has a heartbeat. In what Karen Barad (2003, 817) calls “the process of mattering,” things come to matter in both senses of the term. Life is deliteralized in a robust realism of energetic surfaces, qualities, and remainders that withdraw from phenomenological and representational efforts at reduction and paraphrase (see Harman 2011, 2012). Categories are at best an oblique mode of access to the generativity of singularities taking place (Harman 2008)." by Kathleen Stewart , Issue 32.2, May 2017